Guardians of Paradise

by Jaine Fenn

  Jarek changed the subject. ‘I don’t suppose the pilot had the access codes for the computers on his ship?’

  Nual’s expression grew more distant as she rifled through memories that weren’t her own. ‘Only the functions he needed to do his job. The rest was gene-locked to the Sidhe.’ Then her gaze sharpened. ‘One thing he did know: the Setting Sun was heading to the place where the boys from Serenein are processed.’

  ‘Now that I’d like to hear about,’ said Jarek.

  When Jarek went back to his room a little later, Taro was doing a bad job of pretending to be asleep. Jarek showered, went back to the galley and grabbed some food, then made his way to the bridge, where he sat and thought about what they should do next. The autopilot had put them in a wide parking orbit around Xantier Station; Jarek had yet to make a docking request.

  When he came back down, Nual was sitting at the table. Taro was playing a game over at the ents unit, kitted out in interface headset and gloves. The atmosphere in the room was painfully tense. Jarek overrode the game from his com then waited while Taro’s arms dropped to his sides.

  ‘Sorry about that,’ he said when Taro took the headset off. He raised his voice to make it clear he was addressing them both. ‘We need to decide where we go from here.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Nual. ‘We do.’

  Taro was looking anywhere but at Nual.

  ‘I meant generally,’ added Jarek, in case they expected him to sort out their relationship problems.

  ‘As did I,’ said Nual. ‘What do you suggest?’

  ‘I think we need to follow up on what happens to the boys from Serenein.’ Jarek turned to Taro. ‘We now know that they go to a world called Kama Nui. There’s only one shipment every two or three decades - that’s how often the Sidhe visit Serenein, because it takes that long to accumulate enough talented boys to make it worth their while. And this time the shipment won’t be turning up.’

  He looked back at Nual, including them both again. ‘By now, the Sidhe’s contacts on Kama Nui must be wondering where the Setting Sun has got to. The other Sidhe are probably concerned that it hasn’t checked in too, so we need to act quickly, before they start acting on their suspicions. However, there’re a few complications.

  ‘The first is that if my ship is known to the Sidhe, then it would be unwise of me to start sniffing around one of their dirty little secrets. The second is this: I’ve got business I can only do at a hubpoint: if I don’t sell my cargo and raise some credit soon then we won’t have a ship with which to carry on the fight against the Sidhe. Also, I still need to get the files I took from the Setting Sun decrypted, and Kama Nui isn’t the place for that.’

  ‘So you want us to go to Kama Nui and follow up this lead?’ Nual didn’t sound averse to the idea.

  ‘You don’t have to - you’re free agents - but that would be ideal. I can drop you there, and I’ll only ever be a beevee call away.’

  ‘I am willing to do this,’ said Nual. She looked at Taro, who was still ignoring her.

  ‘Taro?’ prompted Jarek.

  Taro shrugged. ‘Maybe,’ he said.

  Jarek resisted the urge to go over and shake him; he’d probably been just as much of a jerk himself when he was seventeen. ‘It’ll take us a couple of days to get to Kama Nui: you’ve got that long to decide,’ he said, then added, ‘You might want to look the place up and see what you think. It’s a top destination for rich holiday-makers, and it’s meant to be very beautiful, though I’ve never got beyond the capital myself.’

  ‘It sounds like an odd place for the Sidhe to be . . . altering these boys,’ said Nual.

  ‘The last place anyone would look, perhaps. There’ve always been rumours about the place; I met a freetrader once who said she’d taken biotech supplies to Kama Nui in the same run as luxury foodstuffs - both legit, but an odd combination. Though I’ve not seen any direct evidence myself, I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s stuff going on there that never sees the light of day.’

  The atmosphere aboard the ship remained tense. Taro appeared to be dealing with what Nual had done by pretending she didn’t exist, while she was making a conspicuous effort to be considerate without crowding him.

  Much as he’d enjoyed the boy’s company in bed, Jarek had no intention of being part of his little love-war with Nual, and he suggested he return to sleeping in the rec-room. Taro didn’t argue. He did ask if he could join Jarek on the bridge, and he reluctantly agreed. Though he suspected Taro was using it as an excuse to avoid Nual, he soon found that the boy had an insatiable - and refreshing - curiosity about everything from interstellar travel to Jarek’s tastes in music.

  They were on their final approach to the Kama Nui homeworld when Taro asked Jarek to show him how to download a selection of music tracks onto a dataspike.

  ‘I take it you’re going with her then,’ said Jarek.

  Taro nodded. ‘I have to. I still love her, even with . . . what happened. ’

  ‘Yeah, well, you haven’t exactly been faithful to her.’

  Taro looked at his hands. ‘That’s true.’

  When the time came to say goodbye he hugged them both, and made sure they knew how to contact him. He could only hope he wasn’t sending them into a situation they couldn’t handle.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  For most of his life Taro had viewed tourists with a mixture of awe and avarice: awe because they came from outside his City - his world - and avarice because of the wealth they brought. Yet now here he was, a tourist himself - well, sort of. Their remaining credit wasn’t going to go far on Kama Nui if they went for the full luxury experience, so they took Jarek’s advice and entered on youth visas. The permits would allow them to live and work here for a limited time; it was popular with a lot of rich kids who got their families to stump up the price of a ticket, no small expense in itself, and then were able to see the place on the cheap - relatively speaking.

  Jarek had timed their arrival carefully, dropping them off just before a regular shuttle from a starliner. Though they looked out of place amongst all the designer finery, they would be able to move through customs with the ordinary tourists.

  At least that was the theory.

  Taro wasn’t surprised when one of the uniformed officials took them aside and asked, politely enough, what a pair of registered assassins wanted to come to Kama Nui for.

  ‘Nothing sinister,’ said Nual. ‘Just a holiday.’

  ‘I see,’ said the man. Taro wondered if he was after a bribe; that was how they’d got the gun past customs on Khathryn: a little bit of hush money. Nual would know. ‘The thing is,’ continued the official, ‘we’re a peaceful world. Weapons like yours are illegal here.’

  ‘I understand,’ Nual said calmly. ‘I am aware that we will have to leave the gun with you for the duration of our stay.’

  Taro hadn’t been aware of that at all - but he’d left the research to Nual, because he’d thought for a while he might be carrying on without her. Part of him still thought he should be.

  ‘Your blades are a problem too,’ continued the official apologetically. ‘I’m afraid we’ll have to peace-bond them.’

  ‘Of course.’

  Taro wondered why Nual didn’t apply a bit of Sidhe coercion, rather than leave them completely defenceless, but the peace-bonding turned out to be no more than a token gesture: the official sprayed their wrists with a synth-skin compound which covered the slits the blades emerged from and had them sign waivers; they’d get fined if the covering was broken when they left. Taro hoped no one pissed him off, as his blades still weren’t entirely under conscious control.

  The pictures and holos of Kama Nui he’d called up on the Judas Kiss had looked almost unreal - all shining blues and greens and golds. Jarek had let him watch as they approached over an expanse of deep turquoise water. Taro could hardly believe the sea here was the same stuff as Khathryn’s grey-green oceans.

  The colourful impression was reinforced when they came out of customs into
a reception area bright with flowers and tasteful adverts. The new arrivals were greeted by well fit dark-skinned young men and women who put garlands of pink and orange flowers around their shoulders. Taro had to bend down to receive his.

  Beyond the starport, things were rather different. A clean but plain bus drove them the short distance to Stonetown, the capital, through a barren, dusty landscape of faded yellow under a bleached blue sky completely free of clouds. The sea shimmered on the horizon.

  Taro found his first impression of Stonetown an odd mixture of the familiar and the alien. The blocky buildings reminded him of Khesh, though the roofs were sloping rather than flat, and the windows were larger. When he looked more closely he saw carved and painted stone decorations, eye-catching patterns with hints of plants or animals or faces, set over doorways and under eaves, running in bands to mark different floors. The streets were crowded, and everywhere he looked he could see familiar business going down: shopping, sightseeing, haggling - though he didn’t spot any less respectable trade. Instead of riding in pedicabs, people who weren’t walking got around on motorised bicycles or in ground-cars or buses. Most of the people were brown-skinned and black-haired, and they were wearing less - though brighter - clothing than he was used to. They even moved differently: less purposefully, like they were walking this way because they felt like it, not because they actually needed to get anywhere.

  When the bus doors opened to let them off in the main square, he discovered another difference between here and Khesh. The bus, like the spaceport, had had tinted windows and artificial cooling - aircon - but out in the open the burning sun sucked all the moisture from the air and replaced it with heat. Sweat broke out all down his back the instant he stepped into the square and he found himself squinting in the bright light despite the shade from the odd-looking tall trees dotted around the place.

  They’d booked accommodation in a hostel, which turned out to be a communal living-space on the third floor of an office building. There were separate sleeping rooms for men and women, and a shared kitchen and common room at one end. And there was aircon too, though it was erratic.

  He was half relieved, half annoyed to be forcibly separated from Nual by the sleeping arrangements. They still hadn’t talked about what’d happened with the pilot. It hadn’t felt right to have that discussion with Jarek around, and meanwhile, Nual continued to act all calm and distant, like there wasn’t any problem.

  After he’d staked his claim by leaving his few possessions on a bed he went to see how Nual was getting on. He found her looking out of the window in the women’s room. The view was mainly rooftops, and the distant glitter of the ocean. Like him she’d stripped off her outer layers; he tried not to stare at the bits of her body her vest top revealed. He wondered if the time was right to bring up what she’d done. There was no one else around, and they had to have it out sometime. Maybe later today. Not now, when they were hot and tired. He nodded at the view and said, ‘It don’t look much like the brochure; good job we’re not really here for the scenery.’

  ‘Would you like to know some of Kama Nui’s history?’ she asked. She kept her tone neutral, like she was only asking because she knew he couldn’t read well yet, not because he’d almost decided not to come with her and so hadn’t bothered to research the place. ‘It might be useful.’

  Taro shrugged. ‘If you like.’

  ‘It is not a natural world,’ she started. ‘When the Sidhe first brought humans here, back in Protectorate times, there was no life on land.’

  ‘Don’t look like there’s much now.’

  Nual ignored the interruption. ‘There are two large landmasses, both deserts, but Kama Nui is mainly a water-world. There are tens of thousands of islands. Its natural weather-cycles were always extremes: hot and dry and still for days or weeks or months, then suddenly everything would come together in a wave of cyclones - violent storms, far worse than anything you saw on Khathryn. Anything living in the sea was relatively safe, but life never had a chance to develop on land. What land creatures are here now are all imports, many of them from Old Earth.’

  ‘Seems like an odd place for - what d’you call it? - a “holiday resort”? Odd place for one of those if there was fuck-all here.’

  ‘It is believed the Sidhe carried out some terraforming. They also limited their settlements to areas out of the paths of the worst cyclones, and provided weather-shields for the major islands and the one city - there is still only the one city. The people the Sidhe took from Old Earth to settle Kama Nui were native to marine archipelagos there. They had been relocated when the seas inundated their original homes, so they were used to the idea of retaining their culture through change. Most now live a traditional island lifestyle - at least that’s what the guidebooks claim.’ She smiled quizzically. ‘They also say that even during the Protectorate this place was exclusive, visited only by the lucky few - and of course in those days the lucky few would have been Sidhe.’ ‘So does that mean they’ve still got a lot of influence here?’ Taro looked around, like he might catch Sidhe agents hiding under the bed. Paranoia was catching. ‘No, there is no need to worry,’ said Nual. ‘The pilot did not consider this place to have any Sidhe presence. He knew only that one of the corporations here is responsible for producing transit-kernels. ’

  Taro tried to think only about the facts, not how she came to have them. ‘I don’t s’pose you know which one?’

  ‘No, he’d never been here himself. The last drop-off of shift-minds occurred twenty-five years ago, before he came to live on the Setting Sun. He was looking forward to visiting Kama Nui—’ Nual appeared to catch herself, then continued, ‘There are five corporations large enough to hide such an operation. Once we’ve settled in we need to find out which one it is.’

  ‘Right,’ he said.

  She pushed herself away from the window. ‘But first we should go shopping: we need clothes and we need food.’

  Taro followed her out in silence.

  Halfway down the stairs they met a youth a little older than Taro coming up. He had pale skin and sandy hair and wore a brightly coloured shirt with a wrap in clashing colours tied around his waist. ‘Kioruna!’ he said brightly as he passed.

  To Taro’s surprise Nual responded, ‘Kioruna!’

  The boy stopped on the stairs, his gaze flicking between the two of them with open curiosity. ‘Just arrived?’ he said cheerfully.

  ‘Yes, this afternoon,’ said Nual.

  ‘Well, if you’re heading out for supplies, don’t go to the harbour-side market. Never mind what the guides say, you’ll pay through the nose for shopping by the sea and half of what’s for sale is just for the tourists.’

  ‘Aren’t you a tourist?’ asked Taro. He didn’t like the way the boy was looking at Nual.

  ‘Technically, yeah; you got me there. But I’m here for the year and I’m working to pay my way. Name’s Thimo Lauren, for which you can blame my parents. Everyone calls me Mo.’

  Despite his misgivings, Taro found the boy’s open and friendly manner infectious. ‘Taro sanMalia,’ he said.

  Mo turned to Nual. ‘I’m Ela sanMalia,’ she said.

  Taro still found it odd to hear her use the name on her ID.

  Mo looked between the two of them, ‘So you two are . . . ?’

  ‘Taro is my half-brother,’ said Nual.

  ‘We had different fathers,’ said Taro, truthfully enough.

  ‘The tall half of the family then. Where’re you from?’

  Before Taro could embellish further, Nual replied, ‘Vellern, in the Tri-Confed system.’ Other than Nual’s name and their relationship, the IDs the Minister had provided were otherwise accurate; a partial fiction is a lot easier to maintain than a downright lie, the Minister had said.

  ‘Vellern? Isn’t that the world ruled by assassins?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ said Taro.

  ‘Although we do have an odd system of government,’ said Nual. ‘And we also have areas with differing levels of
gravity.’

  ‘Aha, hence the height.’ Mo shifted slightly. ‘Listen, a few of us are going out this evening, to a local bar. Would you two like to tag along?’

  ‘That would be good, thank you. Taro?’

  ‘Guess we could.’

  ‘See you later, then,’ said Mo, and bounded away up the stairs

  Nual had registered her com with the local network - it was in her new ID, so she reckoned it should be safe enough here - and now she looked up an alternative market. They ended up in an open-sided warehouse where the thick air was stirred by slowly beating ceiling fans. The place was loud and smelly and full of locals who greeted them with smiles and invitations to examine their wares, which consisted of piles, baskets, jars, boxes and bags of items in a bewildering variety of shapes and colours. This much fresh stuff would’ve cost a fortune in Khesh. If the occasional outbreaks of legs and eyes and fins were anything to go by, a lot of it used to be alive. From the movement in the tanks filled with murky water at the back of certain stalls, some of it still was.